Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit

Many large companies can afford to spring for expensive software packages that monitor what people are saying about your company, industry, and competition online; however, for those of us looking for an inexpensive solution, Yahoo Pipes can be an important tool.

After I published the 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demo on Monday, I realized that I have done many posts about Yahoo Pipes without ever writing about why people should care about the technology and how it can used. I decided it was time to devote a post to explaining how people can use Yahoo Pipes and get actual business benefits.

Using Yahoo Pipes can help you understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more through smart filtering of blogs, news sources, Twitter, and other online sites. Your customers are talking about you and your competitors are revealing information that you want to know online. Can you find it quickly and efficiently now?

A few business benefits from using Yahoo Pipes:

Become more responsive to your customers by knowing when and where people are talking about your company and products on blogs and Twitter. Find and respond more quickly and efficiently.

Use what people are saying about your company and your products to improve your products / services, marketing messages, web content, documentation and other communications.

Get insight into your competitors.

Keep up with important information about your industry by focusing on keyword filtering to find the most relevant content for your situation.

Monitoring dashboards will help you disseminate the information from Yahoo Pipes throughout the rest of your organization.

While I think that monitoring is always important, I usually emphasize it when I am working on blogging strategies with clients. Knowing what people say about your organization, your industry, and your competition is an important element of a blogging strategy. All of the information found via Yahoo Pipes for the purposes above can then be used to generate ideas for blog posts or other communications.

4 thoughts on “Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit”

Dawn, you’ve outlined some wonderful benefits of using Pipes to both monitor the social web and save a whole lot of time in doing so… the speed to information is why I really love Pipes. Filtering the wheat from the chaff is the hardest thing when you’re relying on raw RSS, and the biggest benefit of Pipes. Plus, they’re really fun to work with. Especially for those of us who’ve never learned to program anything before.

I’ve found that Pipes themselves are – by their very nature – social. You’ve been especially generous in sharing your Pipes with those of us who’ve dabbled in them, but are not as practiced in creating them as you are. I hope you get the recognition you deserve for sharing not only your knowledge of Pipes, as you’re doing here, but your Pipes themselves. For both, I thank you.

Janet, Thank you, and I’m glad you are enjoying both the shared pipes and the information that I’ve been publishing along with them. I’ve found Yahoo Pipes so useful that I want other people to know how easy they are to use once you get the hang of it. I owe my introduction to Justin Kistner who gave me a quick 5 minute demo when I was first overwhelmed with all of the options, so I’m trying to pay it forward 🙂

We even had a data plumbers user group at one point which met a couple of times and fizzled out, since only about 5 of us were actively using pipes. Maybe we’ll look into starting it up again after we get through the holiday season.

You can also look forward to a few more 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demos soon. I used some time over the long holiday weekend to record the next 3 in the series: accepting user inputs, vanity feeds, and using the debugger. They should trickle out over the next 3 weeks or so.

Companies and Communities is focused on helping your company get real business value out of participating in online communities and social media. This book contains practical advice and suggestions for how companies can engage with online communities and social media sites.

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The opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and do not reflect those of my employer.